Managing culture creep: Toward a strategic model of user IT culture

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Abstract

This article describes a framework of IT user culture that has implications for organizational IT strategy. The research was conducted in multiple settings with a grounded theory approach. The resulting framework is anchored to nine archetypal IT user profiles and encompasses their inter-group dynamics. By adopting a cultural perspective on IT usage, the framework can inform IT adoption and usage strategy with possible cultural antecedents and determinants of usage constructs common in IS research. The proposed framework suggests how management can influence the migration of IT user culture (culture creep). This framework can also enrich other acceptance models in order to more fully consider the human factor during IT implementation and adoption. The results underscore the importance of culture-customizing organizational IT socialization, training and evolution programs.

Introduction

Many Information System (IS) implementation failures are attributed to human/organizational issues rather than technical problems (Au et al., 2008). The concept of Information Technology (IT) usage is a multi-level construct consisting of individual level, group level, and organizational level (Burton-Jones and Gallivan, 2007). It involves the user, the system, and the task (Burton-Jones and Straub, 2006). Because it involves the user, it necessarily also involves the user’s culture. Culture is an important factor in the acceptance and effective use of information technologies (Gallivan and Srite, 2005, Gallupe and Tan, 1999, Kappos and Rivard, 2008, Leidner and Kayworth, 2006, Straub et al., 2002).

Our concern for culture arises most obviously in the globalization, internationalization and offshore outsourcing that have become everyday elements of many organizations. IS has played an essential role as catalyst in this phenomenon, enabling and accelerating the cross-border processes. As a consequence, many IT adoption and diffusion settings are also cross-cultural. IS cultural studies often center on national or organizational culture (Gallivan and Srite, 2005, Leidner and Kayworth, 2006) and disregard other cultural dimensions important in IT usage, such as religious culture, or ethnic culture.

The pervasiveness of IT in users’ everyday life blends IT with social practice and brings forward the cultural dimension in IT usage. The concept of a specific IT culture construct has been emerging as an important aspect in IS research (Kaarst-Brown and Robey, 1999, Leidner and Kayworth, 2006, Massit-Folléa, 2002; etc.). While such studies are deeply descriptive and insightful, there is little investigation of the more pragmatic notion of how IT culture might respond to management activity (Ford et al., 2003). The existing research helps us to identify and assess IT cultural profiles, but even if we conceptualize a cultural goal for IT projects, we know little about any instrumental strategy that might change an IT culture.

Our research into cultural strategies evolved from a consequentialist perspective: How do IT cultures emerge from IT usage? If we could understand how cultures emerge, it could lead to models with more strategic purposes. In order to study such ‘cultures-in-motion’, we studied and tracked IT user cultural profiles over a period of 24 months. We investigated possible differences between users expressed by their IT usage by employing known user culture profiles together with new profiles found in the data. Because we followed a grounded theory methodology, the research was conducted iteratively: alternating and combining data collection, data analysis, and comparison between existing theory and emerging concepts. For the purpose of this paper, however, the work is presented sequentially in order to ease reading and promote comprehension.

Section snippets

Culture and IT culture

Defining culture is a challenge in itself. There is a wide range of viewpoints on this concept and even a lack of consensus as to its definition: Kroeber and Kluckohn had already identified 164 definitions of the concept of culture in 1952. Passeron reminds us that “culture is the most protean of sociological concepts. More than other polymorphous concepts […] culture is the term which leads us to the most vertiginous maze of a Babelian library”.

Culture, needs and motivation

Rokeach (1973) indicates that needs have to be processed through group norms in order to be cognitively represented and transformed into values. Norms prescribe or proscribe some behaviors in specific situations whereas values transcend specific situations. According to Rokeach, norms bring an attribute called oughtness (i.e. what an individual ought to do in order to follow group norms) that acts upon individual needs, leading to values. Values possess the oughtness attribute, but needs do

Methodology

We used a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967, Glaser, 1978, Strauss and Corbin, 1990, Strauss and Corbin, 1994) involving an interpretive and hermeneutic orientation (Klein and Myers, 1999). This exploratory, adductive mode (Peirce, 1974) resulted in a taxonomy arising from the continuous interplay between the collection, the analysis and comparison of data, as well as the consultation of relevant literature to improve our theoretical sensitivity (Glaser, 1978).

Results

We found that the subjects in our study reflected a set of cultural features. However, this set of features was not common to every subject, but rather each subject reflected a subset of these features, and certain features more than others. This result is not surprising considering the complexity of culture. We can most easily report these results by first delineating the general cultural feature set. We will represent these features as “culture archetypes”, or idealizations of a pure cultural

Discussion

The large body of work that seeks to meaningfully classify users is nearly omnipresent in the information systems literature. These works adopt very different levels of analysis and methodologies. Space limitations do not permit here a summary of this extensive literature; however, Appendix C summarizes in chronological order previous typologies which we found relevant to our work. This table does not pretend to be exhaustive. Our purpose was to focus on typologies that were anchored to

Limitations and future research directions

Like all interpretive works, our results may contain interference from the cultural bias of the subjective researcher. It is a common issue with cultural research, “Because we are of our own culture, it is difficult for us, researchers and managers alike, to both live in our cultural context and to question it. It is difficult to engage in contextual, reflexive management and research, with the requirement of examination and critique of one’s own assumptions and values.” (Smircich, 1983, p.

Conclusion

This research has mobilized needs, motivation and self-determination theories within the context of an interpretive case to develop an IT culture users’ taxonomy. This taxonomy identifies a new set of IT user cultural profiles that includes both original profiles and refinements of previously identified profiles from the literature. The results show how user IT culture evolves simultaneously with the emergence and development of their IT needs.

Humanity has migrated along its history from an

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the clear and constructive reviews from the associate editor, Dr Sirkka Jarvenpaa, and all the reviewers on the earlier versions of this article. Their comments have substantially helped us improve our work.

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